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On 18 and 20 January, musician, mystic and laughter meditation practitioner, Laraaji leads a series of workshops during the opening days of the Grace Wales Bonner exhibition that will become a lasting shrine of sound.

About

Friday 18 January 20197pm

Deep Immersion Listening Session

During Friday’s exhibition opening, Laraaji will improvise a performance featuring his distinctive electric zither, vocal sound, inviting audiences to experience moments of quiet and silence in a listening session that explores access to inner stillness.

There will be a limited capacity and places will be offered on a first come, first served basis. The performance will last for 45 minutes.

Sunday 20 January 201911am and 4pm

Laughter and Gong Tone Meditation

On Sunday 20 January, Laraaji will host two Laughter and Gong Meditation workshops leading participants through vocal exercises to warm the mouth, throat, chest and heart, which open the body to internal laughter. Following the workshop, Laraaji will use gong tones to guide participants from sound to stillness, from the roar of the external world into the serenity of the inner self.

There will be a limited capacity and places will be offered on a first come, first served basis. Each workshop will last for 60-90 minutes.

Based in New York City, Laraaji attended Howard University, a historically black university in Washington D.C. on a scholarship to study composition and piano. Laraaji began playing music on the streets in the 1970s, improvising trance-inducing jams on a modified autoharp processed through various electronic effects. It was during this time that he began to study Eastern mysticism, believing that he had found a new path for his music and life. In 1979, Brian Eno saw Laraaji playing in Washington Square Park and invited him to record an album for his seminal Ambient series (Ambient 3: Day Of Radiance, released 1980). Eno has continued to influence Laraaji’s music, as has the work of Alice Coltrane, Constance Demby, Iasos, Harold Budd and J. D. Emmanuel. It was also this time that Laraaji was invited to the new age bookshop, Tree of Life, in Harlem, where he would donate music to accompany live readings. Two of the brothers who owned the shop intuited a past life with consciousness and music within Laraaji and came up with the name that he goes by today. A celestial music pioneer whose work traverses the monastic and the ecstatic, Laraaji has continued to expand his mystic studies with gurus such as Swami Satchidananda and Shri Brahmananda Sarasvati, founder of the Ananda Ashram in Monroe, New York.